One of my earlier posts discussed the learnability of a service as a key challenge for experience design. Today I ran across this early video from Don Norman on learnability and product design. I thought I would share it.
A Learnability and Experience Design Update
November 9, 2011
Leave a Comment » | 
Experience Design, Innovation, Learning Experience, Service Design, Social Business Design, User Experience | Tagged: Collaboration, Customer Experience, Experience Design, learnability, learnable, Social Business Design, social learning, user experience | 
Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Social Flow and Collaboration in Gameful Design
June 27, 2011
Courtesy of wetwebwork photostream
In Social Flow in Gameful Design I made the point that social flow contrasts to Csikszentmihalyi’s original concept of individual, or solitary flow, in which a person’s engagement in actions is optimal when they lose a sense of time and awareness of self in an intrisincally rewarding feeling of accomplishment. Social flow implies a qualitatively different order of the flow experience, a group-level experience. To that extent, gameful designs that take social flow into consideration incorporate a different set of design principles to those involved in what most people currently refer to as gamification.
In a similar vein, Simon Wiscombe recently observed , “Gamification is inherently flawed because it focuses on rewarding players for the end-state.” He adds that designs that gamify are best when they focus on the journey rather than the outcome, especially if the aim is to evoke the voluntary, ongoing engagement of participants. I emphasize the importance of voluntary experience because if you can’t quit playing when you want to the experience is not a gameful one. Recent social psychological research supports Simon’s point.
Walker recently offered a series of relevant social psychological studies on social flow:
Flow in a social context may be a qualitatively different phenomenon than flow experienced in isolation. Classic research in social psychology has amply demonstrated that people act, think, and feel qualitatively differently within a group than by themselves…Social contexts introduce additional variables that may inhibit, facilitate, or transform flow experiences. Social contexts can be enormously complex. They range from ‘mere presence’ situations where individuals perform in the midst of passive others…, to co-active situations where people perform side-by-side but do not interact, to highly interdependent interactive situations where people must cooperate and coordinate their performances within established groups…In highly interdependent situations, people may serve as agents of flow for each other. This form of social flow is mutual and reciprocal, a form that is likely to be qualitatively different than solitary flow (my emphasis). In mere presence and some co-active social situations, a form of solitary flow is probable because the unit of performance is the individual, however when the unit of performance is a group, especially a team that must do tasks requiring interdependence and cooperation, social flow should be more likely. Social flow should be easily seen in highly cohesive teams in which there is agreement on goals, procedures, roles, and patterns of interpersonal relations and the competency of team members is uniformly high… (see original text for references, my emphasis added).
The main thing to note from Walker’s research is that it confirms Csikszentmihalyi’s point (p. 158) that flow experiences occur most frequently in work settings, yet qualifies it by noting that “social flow is more joyful than solitary flow.” Moreover, interactive situations compared to co-active ones scored highest in social flow in Walker’s research.
Read the rest of this entry »
8 Comments | Experience Design, Gameful Design, Social Business Design, Social Learning | Tagged: adaptive case management, Barely Repeatable Processes, business process, Business process management, exception handling, flow, group flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, mlearning, mobile learning, social business, social flow, social learning, Social psychology | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Social Flow in Gameful Design
May 21, 2011
Courtesy of Haxney's Photostream
To start I want to acknowledge that the term “gamification” is not the subject of this post even though it is the buzz term these days. So before going further let me explain why I think the term is misleading.
When used as a noun, gamification implies a standardized design process and I don’t think one exists for implementing game design that enables relationships in social business. I prefer to follow Jane McGonical’s use of the term gameful to reinforce the point that the spirit of games rather than the mechanics is most important in designing for what makes experience playful, especially in collaboration. I do use gamification in the context of other people’s discussions though. In additon, I use the verb gamify to imply an activity.
Don’t Gamify Wild Bill discussed the importance of designing for voluntary play in serious games. Playfulness is the baseline requirement for any game designed to provide useful indicators for gauging individual and organizational successes over time.
The qualifier over time is the key point to keep in mind. Specifically, those interested in gamifying employee engagement in social business, and who also aim to effectively use collaboration, must optimally design for emergence not just competition and cooperation as guiding principles.
To echo the position taken by many game designers on the subject of gamification, you can’t simply add game mechanics to employee participation in business processes and expect voluntary engagement by players over time.
2 Comments | Collaboration, Community 2.0, Experience Design, Gameful Design, Social Business Design, Social Learning | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Don’t Gamify Wild Bill
April 26, 2011
- Courtesy of eschipul photostream on flickr.
There is a lot, actually a whole lot, of buzz over the past year about the gamification of business, specifically marketing, training, customer service. The discussion too often overlooks the simple point that it is the experience with it, the playfulness of it, that makes a game. Not the scoring system, or the rewards, or anything else can make up for a game that participants (customers or employees) don’t experience as play. I’m not saying that incorporating game mechanics into relationships cannot create a motivating dynamic, at least over the short run. It certainly can.
Jesse Schell offered the point earlier this year that a game is a problem solving situation people enter into because they want to. He went on to say that if you can make a task feel like a situation people enter into because they want to then you’ve made it a game. Additionally, in her presentation “We Don’t Need No Stinkin Badges” Jane McGonical observes that gameful experience requires that participants experience the spirit of gaming rather than simply the mechanics, in other words that the rewards of playing a game people want to continue playing are intrinsic rather than extrensic.
The point of this post is to note that gamifying business to engage customers is one thing. Customers can almost always walk away from a commercial relationship if they want to, except perhaps in dealings with health insurance companies and utilities. Gamifying business to motivate employees is entirely another type of design challenge.
Using gamification to elicit patterns of action that enable employees to work together, such as knowledge sharing, easily slips into involuntary play and reinforces the type of competition that currently sustains siloed organizations. I’ll add to this point in a subsequent post on gameful collaboration where I contend gamification in social business aiming to increase collaboration must design for emergence, not just competition and cooperation, as guiding design principles for play. However, for now, let me just flesh out the point about gamifying employee relationships with an example from the construction industry and personal experience.
2 Comments | Collaboration, Experience Design, Gameful Design, Learning Experience, Social Media | Tagged: Business, EBay, emergence, Game mechanics, Gamification, Gartner, intrinsic rewards, Jesse Schell, knowledge sharing, Maryland, Virginia Beach | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Exploring the Usefulness of Chartjunk at STLUX’11
April 5, 2011
At the end of February I co-presented at STLUX’11 with Dave Gray. Our presentation was called Exploring the Usefulness of Chartjunk. The collaboration behind the presentation started as an exchange between the two of us on Twitter regarding whether the whole concept of Chartjunk is a myth. Over a series of conversations about recent research on the relative importance of visual embellishment in how people remember and understand data, I suggested to Dave that we develop a presentation around the topic. Dave agreed and suggested that we also build the presentation in a manner that engaged the audience to share their thinking about the issues involved.
Dave and I designed the presentation as a simulated debate between the pre-eminent critic of Chartjunk (actually the design theorist who formulated the concept) Edward Tufte and Nigel Holmes, an illustrator and the former Graphics Director at Time Magazine. Homes is well known for his use of visual embellishment in designing graphics that tell stories about data relationships. We designed the presentation around four graphic displays, two by Tufte and two by Holmes. We discussed the graphics and then asked members of the audience to consider each graphic on four dimensions.
- ease of understanding what it is about
- ease of understanding the categories and values displayed
- ease of seeing the basic trend
- ease of determining whether it conveys a message
I designed a simple survey that allowed us to gather data on those four dimensions using an implicit five point scale, eliciting participation and dialogue with the audience at the same time. The graphic below provides a view of the survey’s instructions. The participants seemed overall to enjoy the approach and the evaluations confirmed the impression.
We drew the four dimensions from research done in 2010 by members of the Interaction Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. The Interaction Lab researchers designed an experimental study to test two basic questions: “first, whether visual embellishments do in fact cause comprehension problems; and second, whether the embellishments may provide additional information that is valuable for the reader.” I’m not going to detail the methodology used, however the researchers asked four questions to participants in the research as they reviewed graphics by Holmes with a great deal of visual embellishment or the same graphics after applying the data-ink ratio used by Tufte.
Q1–Subject: ‘What is the chart is about?‘ ‘Tell me about the basic subject of the chart.’
Q2–Values: ‘What are the displayed categories and values?‘ ‘Tell me how the chart is organized and any relevant values.’
Q3–Trend: ‘What is the basic trend of the graph?‘ ‘Tell me whether the chart shows any changes and describe these changes.’ (Note that this question was not relevant for pie charts.)
Q4–Value Message: ‘Is the author trying to communicate some message through the chart?‘ ‘Is the author trying to get across a specific point or is he or she merely presenting objective information?’
We reported on the major findings of the research team to the audience as follows:
- There was no significant difference between plain and image charts for interactive interpretation accuracy (i.e., when the charts were visible).
- There was also no significant difference in recall accuracy after a five-minute gap.
- After a long-term gap (2-3 weeks), recall of both the chart topic and the details (categories and trend) was significantly better for Holmes charts.
- Participants saw value messages in the Holmes charts significantly more often than in the plain charts.
- Participants found the Holmes charts more attractive, most enjoyed them, and found that they were easiest and fastest to remember.
At the end of the presentation, after we covered the research study findings, we then asked the participants to list as many of the graphics from the four discussed earlier and to rate each along the four dimensions. As we broke up the session a few participants asked if we could share the findings from the participative survey.
I agreed to post the results and I am now getting around to it.
Leave a Comment » | Experience Design, User Experience, Visual Thinking | Tagged: Chartjunk, Edward Tufte, information design, Nigel Holmes, visualization | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Social Media Robots, Personas, and Narrative Gaps in Qualitative Research
April 1, 2011
Back in 2006 Hugh Macleod offered the following point on Gapingvoid: “If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives.” At the time I thought it conveyed nicely the point made by Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think that “companies should define customer segments on the basis of similarities in their reasoning or thinking processes” (p. 152) rather than constructs related to demographics. Hugh’s point made a lot of sense when I first read it and the point continues to gain in significance for me.
Hugh’s initial post sparked a range of interesting comments that I encourage anyone puzzled by the quote to read. The one point I’ll make about the topic is that nowhere in the post or the comments does anyone say what they mean by narrative gaps. I’ll attempt to clarify the concept below because it doesn’t simply mean stories. Stories that fill narrative gaps do so by purposively or accidentally creating personal curiosity, imagination, intrigue, or mystery for people experiencing them.
Narrative gaps in our personal stories are resolved through other stories about our own experience, perhaps with a product or service, that help us make sense of the feelings evoked. Specifically, Hugh noted in a later post that people fill in narrative gaps with meanings they construct from their own stories. It is on this point that the concept of personas becomes relevant to narrative gaps and to a recent conception of how to use social media robots, especially DigiViduals™, in qualitative research. Moreover, in this respect I suggest that the challenges involved are analogous to key ones faced by industrial robotics.
1 Comment | Brands, Digital Ethnography, Experience Design, User Experience | Tagged: brainjuicer, brand persona, crowdsource, David Bausola, digividuals, Ethnography, Gerald Zaltman, Hugh Macleod, market persona, market segment, mass ethnography, narrative gaps, Persona, philter phactory, Social Media, social media robot, social network, storytelling, we feel fine, we-research, Will Goodhand | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Social Learning and Exception Handling
December 9, 2010
We know that most learning in the workplace is informal. Most observers put it at around 80%. Recently, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contended that ”as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling.” Of course, that fact is a result of the successes of process automation over the past few decades. Yet, still, The Barely Repeatable Process (BRP) persists as an organizational challenge for business.
Earlier discussions here focused on the importance of exceptions, to business process and formal learning. I examined the implications of the Kirkpatrick Evaluation model to the use of social media in learning experience design, while addressing the challenges facing learning leaders. Leading the Business-Centered Learning Experience noted that evaluating formal learning is as much about organizational learning and change management as it is about individual learning, largely because much of the learning, and performance, that matters today occurs at the group level. Marc Rosenberg recently echoed the point in an article in Learning Solutions Magazine, The Special Sauce of Social Learning. Marc noted that social learning is largely a change management challenge for organizations.
The most basic point to remember is that exceptions to formal business processes require efforts to design a scalable learning architecture that supports content co-creation needed to adapt to emergent challenges and manage the flow of that adaptation through an enterprise’s ecosystem. Whether judging an adaptation successful requires it to result in new formal learning content, i.e. content co-creation, or a new business process, i.e. organizational innovation, or both, remains an open question.
Echoing John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, and Lang Davison’s focus on The Big Shift, Tim Young recently noted the following about social networking and exception handling,
When an exception happens, we have to step away from our PowerPoint, stop typing an email, or exit a meeting in order to take care of it. Routine work stops. And, our modern reliance on technology to find, aggregate, and alert us to these exceptions has made the task of managing them more burdensome than ever before. Systems that manage exceptions provide the enterprise with vast amounts of data points that have become overwhelming for employees to handle. The applications that we rely on for managing exceptions still rely on process owners to make decisions and respond to the issues. The result is a workforce that isn’t dealing with exceptions well at all. (my emphasis)
The importance of social networking to increasing the effective handling of exceptions is a major focus for those interested in social learning.
17 Comments | e-Learning 2.0, Experience Design, Learning Experience, Social Learning | Tagged: Big Shift, business process, Collaboration, e-Learning 2.0, Enterprise resource planning, exception handling, Experience Design, learning, social learning, Social Media | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Failing to See Money Hiding in Plain Sight
October 4, 2010I’ve discussed ethnography, especially digital ethnography, several times here taking note that, whether we use ethnography in marketing or design research remains irrelevant to the methods employed. What matters is whether we develop the research questions around the assumption that sociocultural practices provide the data source for answers. Ethnographers research settings, situations, and actions, with the goal of discovering surprising relationships. The most surprising relationships though are often hiding in plain sight, right under our noses.
I was recently pointed to a video from a link in the Yahoo Group Anthrodesign. The video, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, provides a unique example of insights about people we can glean from designing situations that transgress established sociocultural practices. I actually watched it three times, and not because Time listed it in the top five viral videos of the week…kind of like people (at least some people) did when the moonwalking bear video came out. Rather, my interest in it was how the mere observation of the actions taken by pedestrians leads us to experience surprise. More on this below. For now, let’s consider the video itself.
After sticking labels on 100 one dollar bills, with a unique message written on each, and clipping those dollar bills to individual leaves on a tree, Ben, Brian, and Amy video recorded how people respond to money hanging on a tree as they walk by it on a street. The narrator, Amy, indicates no crowds showed up to grab all the money they could get, though a few did take more than one dollar at a time. Most people who took money, a minority, pulled a couple of dollars, or one, and moved on.
(UPDATE: You will need to click on the Watch on YouTube link to see the video. Some proprietary thing I’m sure) 
Amy offers two lessons learned from the Money Tree:
- That people routinely walk by a “tree filled with free money” without even noticing
- That people can look at a tree filled with money and not even see it
The Money Tree offers an example of what social psychology, but especially ethnomethodology, refers to as a breaching experiment. Breaching experiments typically involve a researcher breaking a rule about everyday life and then analyzing other people’s response. The Money Tree exemplifies a situation designed to break a tacit understanding about money and sidewalks.
“Money doesn’t grow on trees”, is a phrase most people in Chicago (the location of the Money Tree) probably know. We don’t routinely see money hanging from a tree along a sidewalk. It is certainly more common, as the bicyclist’s experience in the video shows, to see money on a sidewalk. And, I’d wager, most of us just think someone lost it. In other words, merely by setting up the situation to violate the pedestrians’ tacit knowledge of what walking down a sidewalk entails, the videographers show us something about people.
At the same time that the video offers us a surprising experience, it sure would be interesting to know what people who failed to take money were thinking. Anyone else find this interesting?
Posted by Larry R. Irons
Share this post…
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
Leave a Comment » | Collaboration, Digital Ethnography, Experience Design, Ubiquitous Computing | Tagged: Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Business and Economy, Experience Design, Location-based service, Money, social media marketing, Ubiquitous Computing, user experience, Video, Viral video, Yahoo Group | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Video Analysis for Experience Design: The Video Card Family Game
July 12, 2010
From "A Journey Round My Skull's" photostream on Flickr
Digital ethnography is an increasingly feasible research technique as smartphones decrease in cost and more people carry them around. The photographic capability of smartphones is an important resource in making digital research ubiquitous, giving people the ability to capture images and record observations as they go about their everyday lives, and characterize those observations for ethnographers.
Of course, taking photographs and sharing them online as part of a diary or journal for ethnographic research predates smartphones. Smartphones simply increase the likelihood that an everyday experience is recorded as a representation of the moment in which it occurs. Nevertheless, the video recording capabilities of smartphones afford collaborators an opportunity for representing experience in a manner previously unavailable to ethnographic research.
I’ll discuss the range of implications for ethnography posed by the ubiquitous access to video recording capabilities by ordinary people in another post in the near future. For now, my discussion focuses on how to use video in ethnographic research to inform product/service design.
Video of people using products or services is one of the most challenging data resources used in ethnographic research. Playing and replaying video segments for review is time-consuming and, depending on the number of people involved and the type of activity recorded, difficult to distil into agreed-upon insights.
I recently read several chapters from Sarah Pink’s Visual Interventions: Applied Visual Anthropology, thoroughly enjoying all of them. One chapter in particular though, Video Ethnography Under Industrial Constraints, by Werner Sperschneider, really caught my attention. Werner spells out a technique (the Video Card Game) for analyzing video in design research that I remembered reading about several years ago but, at the time, didn’t really give a lot of thought to.
The Video Card Game draws from the “Happy Families” childrens’ card game, a game in which players collect families of four cards as they ask one another in turn for cards of a particular archetype. The goal of “Happy Families” is to collect a family of four cards, forming a stack. Collecting the most stacks makes you the winner.
Werner provides an overview of how researchers in user-centered design at the Danish industrial manufacturer, Danfoss A/S, initially created the Video Card Game as a method for combining ethnographic and visual research methods using video. Design researchers, Margot Brereton, Jared Donovan, Stephen Viller, at the University of Queensland, as well as Jacob Buur and Astrid Soendergaard, of the University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Aarhus, respectively, also provide case studies of its use.
Family Resemblance and the Video Card Game
The Video Card Game’s design provides a collaborative space of interaction for researchers, designers, and design collaborators to co-create insights for product and service design, using video as a primary source of insight. The rendition of the game offered here refers to it as the Video Card Family Game for the explicit purpose of making it clear that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance is a key criteria in the gaming process for deciding to which themes a video card belongs. Using the concept of family resemblance to analyze video enables design researchers to organize, prune, and interpret actions taken in their research with collaborators in the field, providing actionable ideation outcomes.
When playing the Video Card Family Game the key is remembering that, even though the cards give the video a tangible mode of expression, the images remain on relatively small cards, whether on the surface of a table or attached to a poster on the wall. One can imagine an interactive wall display like Microsoft’s Surface that minimizes the legibility problem. Short of such a solution however it is important to keep in mind the spatial limitations imposed by rendering video representations of action onto tangible video cards arranged on tables or walls.
Keep reading if you are curious about how the Video Card Family Game is played in the context of video analysis for design research.
2 Comments | Digital Ethnography, Ethnography, Experience Design, Ubiquitous Computing | Tagged: co-creation, Collaboration, digital ethnography, Ethnography, Experience Design, ideation, Innovation, Ubiquitous Computing, video analysis | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Dialogue Strategy and Social CRM: A Customer Experience with XO
June 7, 2010
From nad2000's photostream on flickr
Over the past five years my thinking and work focus is on the strategic importance of dialogue between businesses and customers. The potential of social software, specifically social media and also Social CRM, to extend dialogic opportunities between the wants and needs of customers and the way companies meet those wants and needs with products and services intrigued me from the start. On several occasions I’ve discussed dialogue in relationship to organizational self-orientation, open innovation, brand strategy, and learning.
As I recently noted,
A dialogue strategy builds on the assumption that companies learn more from customers when customers learn from them, and doing so benefits both. I increasingly think it provides a basic framework to think about, and consider as part of your experience design strategy, when relating to customers. Thought leaders increasingly refer to the challenge as social business design.
The overall premise of this way of thinking rests on the idea that consumers and customers, as well as others with influence in a company’s ecosystem, are gaining increasing power to affect the meaning and value of brand offerings as well as the evaluation of operating assumptions. As a result, strategic efforts of organizational transformation are inevitable for most companies. Dave Evans puts it well,
Social CRM involves multiple elements, linked together, to provide an end-to-end understanding of how your brand, product, or service is received in the marketplace and how your internal processes produce and deliver experiences that drive this reception.
Surprisingly though, we continue to see debate about whether strategic transformation is needed to successfully implement Social CRM, making it seem that all companies really need to do is get on with using social media, or Social CRM tools, as solutions for specific functional areas.
As an example, Barry Dalton recently advocated,
We’ve been talking to customers over the phone for how long? Exactly! So, what’s the difference? Sure, social platforms are more public. But, does the public nature of the channel automatically turn us into bumbling idiots that are going to trash our company’s brands in 140 characters?
Barry seems to make the point that you don’t need to know how much influence a customer exercises in your ecosystem to provide them with services. I certainly agree with him on that point, and I’ll offer a personal account about why later in this post. However, in my view, Barry draws the wrong conclusion from the point. He paraphrases a quote from Frank Eliason at a recent SOCAP conference when someone asked about influencers and influencer analysis. Frank, reportedly said, ” I’m in customer service. I don’t care how influential they are. I need to solve their problem. Do you ask who your customer knows before you answer their question on the phone?”
I suggest that the influence of the customer does matter for the business supported, but not necessarily for delivering customer service alone. Along the same lines, Paul Greenberg notes in his consideration of the concept of Social Relationship Management developed by Brian Solis,
Measuring the whispers gives you some idea of how influential someone can be or how fast a trend can grow or what kind of chatter is spreading about your company — good or bad — and who is spreading it….
…Optimally, using these measures will help you gain some insight into individual customers and their particular influence. If you then provide them with the personalized products, services, experiences and tools they need to sculpt their own relationship with you, because the customer is prone to trusting “someone like me”, it is entirely possible that they will think of your business as a “company like me.”
Influentials matter, especially if they are one of your customers, or even a brand advocate, since they can help you flip the marketing funnel through word of mouth. These opportunities do not reduce to the goals of Public Relations, or marketing, or sales, or operations, or any other specific functional area of a business. The interrelationships are too important for specific functional areas to adopt tailored solutions to their own processes and add the word Social as an adjective, as Mitch Lieberman’s comment on Barry’s post makes clear.
Any strategy needs to support cross-functional goals and objectives which, I think, makes it essential to create or take advantage of new dialogic opportunities, or existing ones, in the business ecosystem. Not doing so, or simply approaching Social CRM as a solution, threatens to fail in an analogous manner as CRM itself did, treating relationships as transactions. Perhaps a cautionary tale about CRM can convey the point. I offer the following anecdote of my own recent experience as a customer of a technology service provider’s CRM system. Note that my experience was a social one, even though the business, XO Communications, doesn’t seem to recognize that social channels exist, nor does it seem capable at managing communication across channels with customers.
8 Comments | Change Management, Collaboration, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Service Design, Social CRM, Social Media | Tagged: customer dialogue, Customer Experience, dialogue, Experience Design, social CRM, social learning, Social Media | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Wayfinding, Purposive Desire, and Service Design
April 20, 2010
My last post dealt with transformations in the grocery shopper’s service journey in the United States since the late 19th century, after creation of the shopping bag. It noted that, before the shopping cart was introduced into grocery stores, the shopper’s journey started with paper grocery bags and noted the transformation required to get shoppers to use shopping carts.
In recent years, local and state governments, grocers and other retailers, as well as many shoppers increasingly understand the environmental impact of using so many disposable bags, whether paper or plastic. Not to mention the direct costs to the grocer in providing the disposable bags.
Paper bags cost four cents each on average and plastic bags one cent. The cost per year in the United States is over four billion dollars, leaving aside all the unintended harm to the environment. This post suggests that shoppers exhibit a purposive desire to use reusable shopping bags. When will the large grocery chains design the customer journey to reinforce the purposive desire of their shoppers? Customers expressing such a purposive desire need symbolic resources to aid them in remembering to take their reusable shopping bags,
from here
or here
to here
and, finally, here
Let’s start off with an anecdote.
Schnucks is a grocery chain in the St. Louis area that I sometimes frequent. The particular store I shop in seems to stock the best Bibb lettuce in my area and that is the main reason I go there. Earlier this year, as I entered that store, I experienced the simplest solution you could imagine to a recurrent problem many retail shoppers face.
Someone in this store took the time to mount a reusable Schnucks bag onto a matte board and attach it to the Enter doorway. 
Even though I was almost in the store when I saw it, the mere sign with no call to action gave me the motivation to turn around and go to my car trunk to retrieve some reusable bags.
My household owns 15 – 20 reusable grocery bags from various retail chains in St. Louis, Schnucks and Dierbergs. I keep several of those reusable bags in the trunk of my car to use whenever I go shopping, especially for groceries. I’m sure many of you do the same with stores in your area. Needless to say though, I can’t count the times I’ve reached the checkout counter and realized that the answer to the “paper or plastic” question is, “Oh crap, I forgot to bring my bags in with me.”
As a recent Twitter poster noted:
A Facebook group even exists for I always forget my green bags.
For those of you who own reusable shopping bags I’d wager you know the experience. In fact, one of the reasons my household has so many of these reusable bags is that my wife often forgets also, but she is not reluctant to just buy another one or two bags instead of using paper or plastic. Don’t ask!
In addition to an inexplicable sense of inappropriateness, which my wife says she shares, in bringing a Dierbergs bag into Schnucks, and vice versa, or banish the thought, to bring a Schnucks or Dierbergs reusable bag into Whole Foods or Trader Joes, the main culprit for my failure to remember is usually just getting in a hurry.
Consider the following numbers:
40% of 1,000 people surveyed by Consumer Reports in the United States say they own reusable shopping bags and use them along with grocery supplied plastic and paper bags
17% of 104,830 people surveyed by MSNBC in the United States say they consistently use reusable shopping bags
Any way you look at the numbers, many more people own reusable bags than use them consistently. Someone at the Schnucks store who posted the sign is obviously listening to those customers who end up at the checkout and express dismay over forgetting their reusable bags. None of the other five or six Schnucks stores I occasionally shop have posted such signs. Schnucks lacks a strategic communications strategy for addressing the green customer need in question, i.e. the desire to remember reusable bags.
Schnucks isn’t alone. Dierbergs doesn’t provide signs to support reusable bag shopping at the start of the customer journey. Neither does Whole Foods or Trader Joes, at least in St. Louis. Nevertheless, the Schnucks store discussed in this post developed a workaround for the overall failure of the company to engage the shopping journey needs of its customers. It serves as a paradigmatic example of service design brought to the wayfinding challenges of grocery shoppers who are interested and motivated to minimize their environmental impact.
A customer that voluntarily expresses dismay over leaving their reusable shopping bags in their automobile trunk, or at home, is also revealing a desire, an emotional response to their own failure to remember a personal commitment to a larger purpose, i.e. they want to act in an environmentally responsible way. It is a purposive desire. I suggest that such purposive desires are relevant to service design and wayfinding, and the sections below outline how.
12 Comments | Experience Design, Innovation, Service Design, Social Business Design, Ubiquitous Computing | Tagged: Customer Experience, David Gibson, desire, dierbergs, Experience Design, Findability, intercept interviews, paper or plastic, Peter Morville, purposive desire, schnucks, signage, trader joes, visual design, wayfinding, whole foods, workaround | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Transformations in the Grocery Shopping Service Journey
April 15, 2010Grocery shopping is one of those chores that we all have to do from time to time. I’m introducing the topic of grocery shopping as a service journey not because the concept is new. In-store ethnographic studies, and shop-alongs, implicitly recognize the concept. Few people who analyze what grocers do, and how people who shop in their stores get the job of buying groceries done, would be surprised that it is a journey. And, of course, the journey starts in the shopper’s home, which Tesco’s Fresh and Easy discovered the hard way when they expanded from the United Kingdom to the United States. What I want to do here is provide a brief, high level history of the U.S. grocery shopper’s journey, and key transformations of that journey, to establish the context for my next post.
Other than time, money, and typically transportation, two pieces of technology are critical to the journey we take as we shop, especially for groceries. We must collect items around the store and move them to the checkout counter. Once our grocery items are checked out and we pay for them, we must move those groceries from the store to our source of transportation. For many of us that transportation consists of an automobile, or other vehicle; for others it may be public transport.
A partial solution to the challenge of collecting items around the store came with the invention of flat-bottomed paper bags by Margaret Knight in 1870. However, it really wasn’t until Walter 
H. Deubner, a grocery store owner in St. Paul, Minnesota, created a shopping bag in 1915 (a paper bag with a cord running through it for strength) that a workable solution to the challenge of collecting and moving items from shelves to the checkout counter came along. The Deubner Shopping Bag carried up to seventy pounds of groceries. In other words, at least initially, the grocery bag was supplied before customers began to shop.
The invention of the shopping cart by Sylvan Goldman in 1936 provided the basis for changing the shopping journey. Consider the problems he faced in persuading shoppers to change their shopping journey.
Goldman’s concept was simple: make shopping easier for the customer and they’ll visit the store more frequently, and buy more. Unfortunately, the customers didn’t want to use the carts. Young men thought they would appear weak; young women felt the carts were unfashionable; and older people didn’t want to appear helpless. So, Goldman hired models of all ages and both sexes to push the things around the store, pretending they were shopping. That, and an attractive store greeter encouraging use of the carts, did the trick.
Paid female model pushing shopping cart.
By 1940 shopping carts had found so firm a place in American life as to grace the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Supermarkets were redesigned to accommodate them. Checkout counter design and the layout of aisles changed.
As a result, shopping bags were relocated in the shopper’s journey, with the exception of small bags for produce and other perishables. The invention of plastic bags later on added another alternative for bagging, in the produce section as well as the checkout counter, and it was a cheaper direct cost than paper.
Today, the result of these basic technologies for supporting grocery shoppers makes the experience much easier, no doubt less stressful on the back and shoulders than carrying heavy bags around the store while shopping. My next post focuses on the current transformational challenge facing the grocery shopper’s service journey through the diffusion of reusable bags.
Posted by Larry R. Irons
Share this post…
: : : : : : : : : :
8 Comments | Customer Experience, Experience Design, Innovation, Service Design | Tagged: Customer Experience, Experience Design, Innovation, reusable bag, Service Design, shopping bag, shopping cart, Social Business Design | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Learnable Services, CRM, and Social Business Design
March 29, 2010
“Presenting a consistent face to customers improves their comfort and satisfaction.”
R “Ray Wang” and Jeremiah Owyang Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management
Marketing, especially social media marketing, and learning, including organizational learning, are both essential components of a dialogue strategy for customer experience design and management. A dialogue strategy builds on the assumption that companies learn more from customers when customers learn from them, and doing so benefits both. I increasingly think it provides a basic framework to think about, and consider as part of your experience design strategy, when relating to customers. Thought leaders increasingly refer to the challenge as social business design.
Given the maturity and diffusion of social media, a dialogue strategy provides a framework to discuss communication as an ecosystem, whether addressing collaboration, innovation, segmentation, sales, customer service, or brands. The key to the process is understanding customers, attracting them, engaging them with sales in mind, empowering them to solve your product and service problems, and learning from them to improve products and services, thereby strengthening your brand. It is not simply segmenting them, targeting them, driving them through interactions, and transacting with them through sales.
Over time, people buy things they need from you rather than someone else because they want what you offer, and because they feel an empathic connection, i.e. that you understand them. From my reading, Wim Rampen’s contention that we need to use segmentation the customer’s way gets to the heart of the point. The challenge of learning how to make an empathic connection increases to the extent that CRM (customer relationship management) aims to align customer engagement directly with business transactions.
Those looking for a direct, sustained connection between customer engagement and sales from Social CRM are expecting too much in my opinion. The key question is whether you know that Jane Smith who called for support tonight also chatted with one of your people earlier, or posted (or tweeted) something positive or negative about you on her blog, or posted something about your product/service to a how-to community forum. Knowing any of those things about Jane’s activities and experiences with your brand increases the potential for empathic connection between your people and Jane, meaning your understanding of what Jane needs from your products/services increases.
It would be nice if a monitoring platform could listen for you and, just automatically, determine how influential Jane Smith really is in the scheme of things. It might be nice to have a social media management system that just took care of everything, gauged the influence of anyone commenting about you online, ranked their value relative to your brand, and prioritized the level of response needed. However, in the near term, regardless of how much we want that panacea, your employees, or outsource partners, are going to need to engage with your customers as though their problems are your own.
Nestle’ can speak to that issue recently. It is important to note that the Nestle’ example is not the first time a company’s supply chain management, rather than a product or service per se, came under organized criticism. Nike and Shell, among others, found their own supply chain relationships under fire over the past decade. Indeed, Shell’s early experiment in 1998 with a blog called Tell Shell came under such negative commentary from the public that the company shut it down. Nike, on the other hand, engaged the debate and incorporated the criticisms into its business model, I’ll leave it to you to decide which brand strategy makes the most sense for customer relationships.
5 Comments | Customer Communities, Customer Experience, e-Learning 2.0, Experience Design, Social Business Design | Tagged: brand, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Customer Experience Management, empathy with customers, engagement, SCRM, Social Business Design, social CRM, Social Media, social networking | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Experience Design and the Intelligibility of Interfaces
February 16, 2010
Created by Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze
As I noted in a post on Peter Morville’s Findability several years ago,
“Interfaces are not what they used to be. The computer-human interface is both more and less than it was a few years ago. Interfaces are not only, or even primarily, a screen anymore. Yet, screens remain important to most design efforts, even though interfaces are increasingly part of the environment itself. As John Thackara and Malcolm McCullough both recently pointed out, entire cities are developing into user interfaces as ubiquitous computing environments expand.”
Caleb, over at MobileBehavior, recently observed that mobile phones do not yet provide users with a graphic language for touch interactions. Caleb’s post points to an early visualization of a standard graphic language offered by Timo Arnall of the Touch project, which researches near field communication. Caleb makes his point by talking about the confusion that consumers experience when faced with a visual tag (v-Tag), or 2D Barcode, and does so with the following Weather Channel forecast that offers viewers an opportunity to interact with a visual tag using their mobile phones (wait until about 45 seconds into the video). The forecast fails to indicate to viewers what the v-tag does.
The user experience team that developed the v-tag for that particular forecast must have assumed viewers would know it represented an invitation to interact. A search on the Weather Channel website fails to return any information on the use of v-tags in their media programming though.
In a previous discussion of Dan Saffer’s book, Designing Gestural Interfaces, I made a similar point about mundane gestural interfaces in public bathrooms, a setting with fairly established graphic language conventions. Yet, even such mundane gestural interfaces can pose difficulty for users. As I noted,
I remember the first time, a few years ago, when I tried to get water flowing through a faucet in a public restroom that used sensor detection. Initially, it was not obvious to me how the faucet worked, and I suspect others continue to experience the same problem based on the photo I took during a recent visit to a physician’s office.
Among other observations, it is important here to note that these examples provide clear instruction for why experience design encompasses user experience. Specifically, people only experience a user interaction if the interactive capability of an artifact is intelligible, if they recognize the artifact as an instance of that kind of thing, i.e. an invitation to interact with media or machinery. Who knows how many people noticed the Adidas logo embedded in a v-Tag on their running shorts, or shoes, and failed to see it as an invitation to a user experience?
People can’t use an interface if it is not recognizable as such or, as the Palcom team coined it, palpable to their use. Otherwise, the invitation to experience, what Dan Saffer calls the attraction affordance, fails. Consider the more telling example of the symbol at the top of this post. It represents an RFID signal environment for devices using the Near Field Communication (NFC) standard. Indeed, Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze’s recent work for the Touch project demonstrates the spatial qualities of an RFID device’s signal, the shape of its readable volume.
Dan Saffer, in Designing Gestural Interfaces, touches on the fact that we are currently missing common symbols for indicating when an interactive system “is present in a space when it would otherwise be invisible,” or when we just wouldn’t recognize it as such. Adam Greenfield’s Everyware made a similar point a half decade ago.
Posted by Larry R. Irons
Share this post…
: : : : : : : : : :
1 Comment | Experience Design, Ubiquitous Computing, v-Tags, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Everyware, Experience Design, Findability, Social Media, social networking, Ubiquitous Computing, user experience, visual tags | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Ethnography, Globalization, and Experience Design
December 2, 2009
Rosetta Stone
One of the most visited posts on this blog is titled, Empathic Research Methods and Design Strategy. Indeed, if you google or bing “empathic research”, the post pops to the top few links, or vey close, often even ahead of IDEO. My aim in that post was to add to points made by Adam Silver, a Strategist at Frog Design, noting that globalization and digitalization in the 1990s resulted in product and service interfaces with more culturally diverse and geographically distributed customers. The combination of these economic and social forces led designers to search for new methods to augment artistic intuition about form and function. Considerations of form and function also required attention to feel, emotions, features, and interactivity attuned to the needs, wants, and beliefs of users/customers. The power of ethnographic research to discern empathic insights by observing and interpreting people’s cultural activity is now widely recognized.
Recognizing the implications of globalization for design and marketing is certainly not new. The now classic book, The Design Dimension, by Christopher Lorenz, explained the crux of the point as early as 1986. Lorenz noted that,
…globalization does not mean the end of market segments, but their explosion to worldwide proportions. Far from declining, the number of market segments may actually increase…Though industrial designers frequently can – and do – substitute for the absence of marketing imagination. In most companies the most potent force for imaginative marketing and product strategy is a real partnership between marketing and design (pp. 146-147).
The significance of Lorenz’ point came back to me recently while reading “How does our language shape the way we think?“, by Lera Boroditsky, an Assistant Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Boroditsky’s research into language and thought complements a key point made in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, Gladwell informs us that one basic reason exists for the tendency of Chinese students to outperform others in math skills. Quite simply,
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits for about two seconds at a time. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right almost every time because—unlike English speakers—since the Chinese language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
Whereas Gladwell’s interest is in the way language and culture affect our view of talent, Boroditsky is interested in whether, and how, language shapes the contours of thought itself, the kinds of questions people who speak a language are able to ask, and the kinds of significant symbols they recognize. Boroditsky’s research looks at an old question, and controversy, in anthropology and sociolinguistics — the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
2 Comments | Brands, Customer Experience, Ethnography, Experience Design | Tagged: empathic research, Ethnography, Experience Design, globalization, linguistic relativity, lorenz, marketing, sapir-whorf | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Thoughts on Cisco, Telepresence, and Reciprocity
November 18, 2009
While meeting for drinks and food at Llywelyn’s Pub a few weeks ago on a Sunday evening with two of my oldest friends, one of them mentioned recently using Cisco’s Telepresence video conferencing. I was keen to learn about the experience. Rocky said the experience was really immersive and described in vivid detail the sense of sitting around an oval table with video feeding into displays that curve with the shape of the table to present participants at distant locations.
My first question was whether the configuration provided a reciprocity display to reflect back to each location how local participants are seen by others at different places. He said that it didn’t. I said it didn’t surprise me at all, given the name of the service — telepresence. It really is a pretentious name if you stop and think about it. After all, presence is roughly the sense one gets from being in an environment, and telepresence is the extent to which one feels present in a mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment.
I consider myself an early adopter of communication tools that provide unique opportunities to engage other people. At the same time, I recognize the fact that face-to-face communication adds interpersonal depth, and not just bandwidth, to relationships that is either missing in asynchronous communication (whether user-generated or marketing -driven), or takes much longer to develop.
6 Comments | Collaboration, Experience Design | Tagged: Collaboration, design thinking, Experience Design, recriprocity, telepresence, video conference | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Customer Competencies, Co-Creation, and Brand Communities
October 20, 2009
Courtesy of Wonderfully Complex's photostream on flickr.
Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off. The recent buzz around the concept of social business points to the growing importance of social networks and communities to the evolution of business practice. Whether companies are in fact closing the community gap or the engagement gap remains an open question though.
As Rachael Happe of the Community Roundtable notes in commentary on the Community Maturity Model:
in the stages before a company becomes truly networked, metrics are isolated to supporting one business process vs. in a networked business the whole business becomes social and the communities are set up to support cross-functional goals.
In other words, customer communities approaching maturity produce value for the business, or organizational enterprise, rather than only a specific functional area – such as research and development, product management, customer support, or marketing. Rachel’s overall point receives validation in a recent article in the September (2009) issue of the Journal of Marketing that reports on long term ethnographic research on brand communities by Professors Hope Jensen Schau, Albert M. Muniz, Jr., and Eric J. Arnould, “How Brand Community Practices Create Value .” The most interesting thought in the article for me is their point that customer competencies are a valuable resource for building co-creation opportunities in brand communities.
Unlike earlier discussions of customer competence, Schau, Muniz, and Arnould contend trying to co-opt customer competencies is the wrong strategy. Rather, their research findings suggest community management benefits from developing opportunities for customers to grow their competencies with the brand. They make it clear that their research indicates, ”Companies wishing to encourage co-creation should foster a broad array of practices, not merely customization.” In other words, don’t try to keep the community focus only on what benefits the brand as you define it.
The important point to keep in mind when discussing value in brand communities is that members create value for themselves through producing cultural capital distinguishing their status relative to the community, aside from the ROI and business value gained by the company owning the brand. Making sure members are provided opportunities to grow their competencies encourages them to reinvest their cultural capital in the brand community.
I discussed co-creation in several posts this past year in relation to eLearning 2.0 generally as well as Nokia and, back in 2005, its overall importance to the challenge of creating successful innovation, including the relevance of customer communities to innovation outcomes. The concept of customer competencies captures the overall significance of co-creation for efforts to produce value through engaging customers. However, Schau, Muniz, and Arnould offer the additional insight that the competencies critical to brand communities are developed through community practices. By practice they mean the linked, implicit way people understand, say, and do things. The term is further used to refer to the activities, performances, and representations (video, graphics, etc.) or talk of community members.
Experience designers can use the concept of customer competencies to inform choices about how to manage practices in customer communities.
Read the rest of this entry »
9 Comments | Collaboration, Customer Communities, Experience Design, Learning Experience | Tagged: brand, co-creation, Customer Communities, customer competence, Customer Experience, elearning 2.0, empathy, empathy with customers, engagement, Innovation | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Using Social Network Analysis in Social Business Design
September 23, 2009
My last post discussed the Open/Closed culture fallacy in social business design. I made the point that leaders of large corporations are typically unable to answer the key strategic questions posed by David Armano of the Dachis Group in a recent important post, Re-designing Your Business Culture. Among other questions, David asked:
Do we want real connections established between employees, customers, partners?
How can we reward those in our ecosystem who actively contribute?
Do we actually want to engage those who want to engage us? Can we?
As this post’s subject indicates, my interest here is to explain how social network analysis, applied to the ecosystems of organizations, helps apply social business design in a manner that avoids the fallacy of open/closed business cultures. We can’t know how open or closed a business culture is until we research, analyze, and understand both its formal and informal networks.
As I noted previously,
To paraphrase Valdis Krebs, a social network analyst, more connections are not necessarily better…Valdis Krebs, and other social network analysts engaged in ONA (Rob Cross and Steve Borgatti, for example) contend that the most efficient and effective adaptation to emergent challenges lies in “the pattern of direct and indirect links” in the ecosystem. You can read a straightforward overview of ONA by Valdis.
This post continues David’s line of thinking by considering a combination of two of his strategic questions in light of the open/closed culture fallacy. I also take a stab at noting how to answer his last question.
13 Comments | Collaboration, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Innovation, Social Networks | Tagged: business culture, Collaboration, community-based planning, Dachis Group, design thinking, empathy, hybrid thinking, organizational network analysis, Social Business Design, social network analysis, Steelcase, workplace effectiveness | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
The Fallacy of Open/Closed Culture in Social Business Design
September 22, 2009Think about a closed business culture. Try to visualize what it looks like. What do you see? Does it look something like a pyramid?
Now, think about an open business culture. Try to visualize it. What image comes to mind? Does it look something like a spider web turned on its side?
These two imaginings pose similar relationships between their parts. A three dimensional pyramid flattened out is about the same shape as a spider web. It is a matter of perspective as to whether one is more open or closed than the other. When connections are made across, rather than only between, the existing nodes in a network we can start to visualize informal relationships in a way that adds value to discussions of culture. It sounds simple, at least initially.
So, how do these observations relate to culture and social business design?
4 Comments | Experience Design, Innovation, Social Business Design, Social Networks | Tagged: Customer Experience, Dachis Group, empathic research, Experience Design, multi-channel, Service Design, Social Business Design | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Reflections on Soil and Smartphones
September 1, 2009
I usually keep my discussions here focused on issues of experience design that cut across challenges faced by a range of professionals as they work to engage learners, customers, consumers, and just ordinary people. However, I saw something today that made me think about soil and the experience of working the soil. Just a little personal reflection I’d like to share.
I try to do a workout each day and today was no different. As I prepared for my 20 mile mental and physical excursion on my stationary bike, filling a large glass of water at the sink, my eyes were drawn to one of the guys who cuts our grass. He was on a large riding mower, stopped in the middle of my back yard, intently working with his thumbs on what looked like a smartphone from my viewpoint. Now I realize this is not a unique thing to see these days. Yet , it evoked a memory of mine that made me smile and take wonder in how an ordinary guy cutting a stranger’s lawn stays connected with anyone he needs to communicate.
I spent my youth in the late 1960s doing farm work in rural Alabama. One of my fondest, and most solitary, memories from that time involves driving tractors early in the morning. Farmers used to turn the soil each spring and then disc it into small clods before planting, a practice that since gave way to the better environmental practice of no-till farming. In the early spring, sometimes with frost still on the ground and a mist hanging in the air, I often found myself in a forty or fifty acre field alone on a tractor pulling a turning plow. Depending on how early it was in the spring, sometimes we tied cotton sacks along the side of the engine to bring back the heat for some warmth.
As the plow cut through the soil it turned the topsoil from about six to eight inches underneath onto the top of the ground. The crispness of the air and the earthy smell of the soil, provided a really pleasing experience, except for times when the wind shifted to blow the smell of the engine exhaust back in my face. The experience of such solitary work encouraged me to sing, which I enjoy doing to this day. Anyway, the image of the guy paused on the mower in my back yard texting someone to stay in touch made me wonder whether farmers still experience solitude when they are alone working a field with their machines.
Posted by Larry R. Irons
Share this post…
: : : : : : : : : :
1 Comment | Experience Design | Tagged: Experience Design, smartphones, soil | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
